[tex-live] fmtutil-sys not playing nice. (OpenBSD-sparc64)

[Jonathan Kew]

On 7 May 2007, at 10:30 am, David Kastrup wrote:

>
> Probably the largest one would be ICU <URL:http://icu-project.org>.
> As far as I have understood, XeTeX uses quite a few libraries to load
> off tasks.  Those are large enough that one would not want to link
> them statically, but of course using dynamic libraries takes away
> consistent versioning: if the libraries change, so will the results.

Actually, xetex does link statically with most libraries in the  
default TL build; the only exception (besides standard C runtime  
stuff, I guess) is fontconfig, as it seems to be necessary to use the  
system's library in order to be sure of finding the proper font  
environment.

You can choose to link other libs (like zlib, freetype2, etc)  
dynamically, and I expect some packagers will do that, but the  
binaries included with TL2007 use static linking wherever possible,  
to minimize runtime dependencies.

In particular, ICU -- the real "biggie" -- can *not* currently be  
linked dynamically because xetex uses a slightly enhanced version of  
ICU Layout with support for some additional OpenType functionality  
that is not available in the standard library. This of course means  
that maintenance is a concern, but thanks to version control systems,  
it has not been a problem to merge a new ICU release with the xetex  
changes.

Eventually, I hope we'll be able to use a completely standard ICU  
library; the extensions xetex uses are things that will probably show  
up in the main release sooner or later, and I'll be happy to make  
adjustments as needed in my code to use ICU's implementation of the  
features when available. Although ICU is a big library, the interface  
between it and the rest of xetex is actually very narrow, and so  
maintaining or updating it is not a big issue.

JK